Conference session organised by Paul Harrison (paul.harrison@durham.ac.uk) and John Wylie – reposted from crit-geog-forum

Paper Session at the 4th Nordic Geographers Meeting
“Geographical Knowledge, Nature and Practice”
ENSPAC, Roskilde University, Denmark. 24.–27. May 2011

Human Remains: the place of the human in a post-human world.

What remains of the human in a post-human world? Specifically, this session asks:  what remains of the human in contemporary geography, after successive waves of anti- and post-humanist thinking? What has been lost and what, if anything, is worth saving? Is it possible or indeed desirable to offer a defence of ‘the human’? Or have critiques of humanist thinking not gone far enough, the figure of the modern human subject being irreconcilably bound to mechanisms of domination and the politics of exclusion?

In human geography in particular, beyond well-established debates on Marxism and humanism, structure and agency, the past decade has witnessed the establishment of strong research agendas and conceptual claims concerning avowedly non-human, more-than-human and post-human geographies. More pragmatically we have seen both institutional shifts and influential calls in which geography is understood and positioned, once again, within a more unified environmental or natural science context.  And we might even ask, what will remain of the humanities as we move, in several countries, into a more nakedly marketised higher education system?

On a conceptual level, from Freud’s suspicions and Marx’s materialism at the start of the twentieth century, to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the Enlightenment, and Foucault’s and Barthes’ death of the author, and onto the emergence of Actor-Network Theory, Non-Representational Theories and a renewed Vitalism, at the centuries’ end, not to mention the strong anti-humanisms of recent Speculative Realist writing, the figure of the human has been subject to de-centring and displacement, dethroning and flattening; its outline fading; its gestures magnetised and its consciousness little more than a synaptic symptom.

Perhaps now it is time to move on, to find different ways of framing and thinking about (and organising and cultivating) subjectivity, sociality, politics and responsibility? This is a consciously wide-ranging and open call. This session thus invites paper which reflect on the fate, figure and place of the human in the contemporary Humanities, Social Sciences and Human Geography, on topics such as, but not limited to:

• The subject and power
• Agency and creativity
• Alterity, ethics and care
• Human rights
• Techniques of the self
• Affective and emotional geographies
• Anomie and alienation
• Land, life and subjectivity
• Geographies/biographies
• Testimony and mourning
• Loss, erasure, traces

If you wish to participate in this session (or ‘track’ as they call it), you will need to submit an abstract (max. 300 words) through the conference website before 15th December 2010:
http://ruconf.ruc.dk/index.php/ngm/ngm2011/about/submissions